Speak My Protocol
I have five different Instant Message accounts; MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ and Jabber. That’s four proprietary systems and one open one (Jabber). Of course, no one wants to have five separate IM clients on their desktop so you end up using some third-party software which can communicate with the different systems such as Kopete, GAIM or Trillian… And upgrade any time that one of the proprietary systems change their protocol slightly (after a couple of days have passed to reverse engineer the protocol change of course).
This is all clearly insane and a good example of where companies insisting on having their own proprietary protocols just results in a big mess for the end user. I don’t even see what MSN, Yahoo etc are gaining by having proprietary protocols in the first place? It’s not like they are charging for the service or anything. Is it all about them standing up against each other with how many users they have on their network? These are the reasons that we need the open software movement to prevail. Even if companies are going to write commercial software, let’s at least have open standards and protocols to connect it all together in a friendly fashion.